Education reporter

Edward Snowden is no hero, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a University of Georgia audience on Monday.

Clapper said Snowden made the country less safe.

Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency worker and National Security Agency contractor, leaked details of massive federal domestic and global surveillance programs to journalists last year. The leak prompted a global debate over how to keep security agencies such as the NSA and CIA from violating constitutional guarantees of privacy and where such lines should be drawn.

More recently, some U.S. Senators have accused the CIA of snooping in lawmakers’ computers.

Clapper, speaking in the UGA Chapel, did not address the truth of falsity of specific accusations against national spy agencies, though he said initial articles after Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents were “inaccurate.”

The revelations are “potentially the most damaging theft of intelligence material in our country’s history,” he said. “As a nation, we are accepting, for better or worse, more risk.”

Already, terrorist groups and other adversaries are changing the ways in which they communicate after learning about how the NSA and some of the nation’s other 15 agencies are trying to keep track of threats against the nation, including threats to businesses, he said.

Clapper recently learned from admissions officers at George Washington University that many students applying for admission consider Snowden a hero.

“The idea that young people see Edward Snowden as a hero really bothers me,” Clapper said.

A better choice for a whistleblower hero would be Sgt. Joe Darby, who exposed torture and prisoner abuse at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq 10 years ago, he said.

Back home in the United States, some called Darby a traitor, and his life was threatened. But Darby went about exposing wrongdoing at the prison in the right way, alerting investigators within the military.

Snowden could have chosen many other less-damaging ways to become a whistleblower than the one he chose, said Clapper, who became the fourth Director of National Intelligence in 2010.

The position came into existence in 2005 in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in an attempt to correct poor communication between 16 civilian and military intelligence-gathering units, the so-called intelligence community, he explained to the crowd in the chapel. As director, Clapper is the principal security adviser to the U.S. president and the leader of the intelligence community.

Snowden could have approached Congress, investigators in the National Security Agency, the U.S. Justice Department, among other less harmful options that wouldn’t have involved going to China and Russia, Clapper said.

However, Clapper acknowledged a need for more “transparency” about what federal security agencies

“That’s been the major takeaway for many of us in the intelligence community, and certainly for me,” he said.

That need for more transparency is why he’s doing more public speaking like his appearance in Athens to deliver one of UGA’s Charter Lectures, he said.

Clapper was initially scheduled to come to UGA last fall, but postponed his talk because of the brief government shutdown at that time.

In the wake of the leaks, Clapper said the nation now faces the most diverse array of threats he’s seen in more than 50 years, from homegrown terrorists like those who set off bombs at the Boston Marathon to the Syrian civil war.

Clapper appealed to students in the audience to consider working for intelligence agencies. He even brought along UGA graduate Sean Curran, who now works for the National Security Agency.

“We need people with the intelligence and dedication of Sean Curran in the intelligence community,” Clapper said. “I think a lot of you would really like working in the intelligence community.”